Latest: New pesticide regulations for Oregon timber companieshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/latest-new-pesticide-regulations-for-oregon-timber-companies
Companies must now give officials at least a week’s notice before spraying. BACKSTORYIn recent years, timber companies have begun spraying herbicides from helicopters to kill competitive forest weeds (“Fallout,” HCN, 11/10/14). Some of those chemicals used, such as 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid — an ingredient in Agent Orange — have sickened nearby residents; some can even cause kidney failure. Oregon is alone among Western states in allowing aerial spraying near homes and schools with no advance warning.

FOLLOWUPOn Feb. 10, Oregon legislators proposed a law requiring timber companies to give officials at least a week’s notice before aerial pesticide spraying and to identify which chemicals they plan to use and where. The bill also directs the state’s Agriculture Department to establish no-spray residential buffer zones. “Oregon isn’t doing enough to protect the health of rural citizens from aerial herbicide sprays,” state Sen. Michael Dembrow told The Oregonian. “It’s time to change these outdated policies.”

]]>No publisherOregonPollutionU.S. Forest ServiceNorthwestForestsPublic healthLatest2015/03/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleCalifornia's water future at a crossroadshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/the-other-nine
A state commission begins deliberations on how to spend $2.7B for water storage. Last fall, when California voters were about to go to the polls to weigh in on a complex proposition to improve the state’s water situation, some environmental groups balked. Though the bill, Proposition 1, to authorize the raising of $7.5 billion on the bond market, promised money for better parks, more wildlife habitat and the restoration of urbanized rivers (like maybe the one that runs through Los Angeles), it also set aside $2.7 billion for “water storage projects” that have a “public benefit.”

But it was never quite clear what those words meant. Would the $2.7 billion become seed money for two new dams on the state agricultural industry's wish list? Or would it go toward groundwater storage projects that keep water closer to home? The bill was written to be "tunnel neutral," meaning it wouldn't automatically pay for a pair of canals that Gov. Jerry Brown wants to build, to draw water from the Sacramento River and ostensibly reduce pumping from the ecologically stressed California Delta. But it wasn't "tunnel negative," either.

“It’s mystery meat,” Adam Scow, California director of the activist nonprofit group Food and Water Watch, said of that $2.7 billion pot. Nevertheless, with Brown's juggernaut of support lined up behind it, the water bill passed easily, with 67 percent of the vote. So now Prop 1's opponents have a new cause: Riding herd on the nine Governor-appointed members of the California Water Commission, the people who will decide how the money gets spent.

Shasta Dam: Will California use its new pot of money to build more like it?

Formed in 1913 to referee water-rights wars in the state, the California Water Commission now exists to advise the Department of Water Resources and supervise the State Water Project. In its current incarnation, it includes at least one bonafide environmental leader of a conservationist bent, Kim Delfino of Defenders of Wildlife, but also one passionate advocate for Central Valley farmers and their water rights, grower Joe Del Bosque, who last year got President Obama to visit his farm with a tweeted invitation. Also on the commission are a Silicon Valley contractor, an engineer, a water district manager, an educator and a consultant. Joseph Byrne, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in California environmental law, was appointed in 2010 and serves as its current chair.

The commission has just begun to deliberate on that $2.7 billion; much of their January 21 meeting was spent setting rules for that process. Members of the public who showed up to speak weighed in heavily on the conservationist side, warning against big water-storage projects that will exacerbate California’s already undeliverable promises to farmers. Such endeavors “have a long history of claimed environmental benefits that didn’t come to pass,” said Barry Nelson of Western Water Strategies, formerly of the NRDC. Tim Stroshane of the Environmental Water Caucus pushed for expanding the use of existing groundwater basins, such as the one in north Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley; “investing in them will lead to less demand for imported water,” he told the commission. “Real water reliability would result.”

The commission has a deadline to finish its Prop 1 work by the end of December of 2016, at which point — assuming they meet that deadline — California may have moved a tiny bit toward a more sustainable water system. Or the state will have continued farther along its current path, in which no storm, no matter how big, can make a dent in the current, grindingly persistent drought. Already agricultural interests are circling the wagons around their share, accusing Brown of reneging on his promises by allocating $532 million in Prop 1 funds for stream restoration, recycling projects, aquifer cleanup and other environmentally friendly ideas. Never mind that such projects were in the bill from the start — they are, after all, what got environmentalists on board — and don't cut into the water storage funds.

No doubt the water commissioners, too, will anger some segment of the state’s population, no matter what they decide "water storage" means for California's future. But they also have a chance to set the state on a course toward fewer crises, and hence fewer water conflicts. As Department of Water Resources director Mark Cowan said at the commission’s January meeting, the “new responsibilities that come with Prop 1 make these probably the most important years in the California Water Commission’s history.” The commission may not, as the Pacific Institute's chief water wonk Peter Gleick rightly argued last November, be able to solve all of California's problems with Prop 1 funds. But their work might just mark the start of asking the right questions.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor of High Country News.

]]>No publisherWaterCaliforniaPoliticsDrought2015/02/11 15:30:00 GMT-7ArticleWhy are environmentalists mad at Jerry Brown?http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/why-are-environmentalists-mad-at-jerry-brown
The California governor has made bold moves on climate — but greens are disgruntled.

Gov. Jerry Brown displays a chart showing temperature increases due to climate change at an agricultural economics conference in 2014.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo

Updated Feb. 3, 2015

On Jan. 5, when Edmund “Jerry” Brown, 76, was sworn in for his fourth term as governor of California, he delivered a treatise on the environment for the ages. He quoted biologist E.O. Wilson. He geeked out on microgrids. He leveled warnings about the climate and announced a plan of action. Within 15 years, Brown said, 50 percent of California’s energy should come from renewables; vehicles should use half as much gas. The energy efficiency of existing buildings should double.

The goals are California’s, but Brown clearly expects the world to follow his state’s lead. If we stand any chance of saving the planet, he said, California “must show the way.”

No governor has ever pledged what Brown has, nor have many spoken so fiercely on climate. So why didn’t Brown’s speech make environmentalists swoon? Beyond a few kind words from Tom Steyer, the billionaire Keystone XL fighter, most guardians- of public health and the planet came away no less pissed off than they were before. Outside the Capitol building during Brown’s speech, activists dressed as oil executives played mock tug-of-war with “the people of California,” yanking a suited man in a papier-mâché Jerry Brown head around like a puppet. It wasn’t clear who won.

Brown hasn’t talked about oil much lately, but early in his third term he made clear what he thought of people who put environmental concerns ahead of California’s then-sagging economy. In 2011, he fired two regulators for subjecting drillers to rigorous scrutiny; two years later, he announced that he wouldn’t be “jumping on any ideological bandwagons” to ban advanced well-stimulation techniques like hydrofracturing and acidizing, which entails dissolving rock with hydrofluoric acid. High-tech extraction techniques are critical to exploiting the Monterey shale, the 1,750 square-mile jumble of oil-packed rock that Brown called California’s “fabulous economic opportunity.” But most environmentalists just want drilling on the shale to stop.

“He could sign an executive order at any moment placing a moratorium on fracking,” says Kathryn Phillips, the director of the Sierra Club’s lobbying arm in Sacramento. “And in light of the information that we have out now, logic would suggest he do so.”

That information includes the 2-degree- Celsius global temperature increase some scientists consider the climate’s breaking point. Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s climate law center, notes that the governor mentioned that number in his speech, but didn’t seem to understand its implications. “We cannot observe that limit if we develop the Monterey shale,” Siegel says. “We just can’t.”

The good news for environmentalists is that Monterey won’t be the nation’s next Bakken: As the Energy Information Administration reported last May, there’s far less recoverable oil there than the 15 billion barrels industry analysts once ballyhooed. Brown signed a law in September of 2013 requiring drillers to disclose their methods, and also calling for studies of their environmental impact. With New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo throwing down an implicit gauntlet with his own state’s fracking ban, Brown might just consider some restraints on oil production when those impact reports come out this summer.-

Then will the rift mend? Unfortunately, it will not. Environmentalist dissatisfaction with Brown extends beyond the Monterey, and some objections come from former allies. As the state’s governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown signed into law protections for California’s coastal waters, pioneered tax credits for rooftop solar and set energy-efficiency standards so strict they obviated the need for a new nuclear power plant — a technology the governor and his then-girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt, rabidly opposed.

But that Jerry Brown is gone now, says Huey Johnson, who served as Brown’s resource secretary from 1976 to 1982. He’s been replaced by a distracted man with a worried eye on his legacy. “In his first two terms, (Brown would) give speeches on the importance of limits, on the limits of resources, the limits of consumption,” says Johnson, now president of the Resource Renewal Institute in Mill Valley, California. “He used to talk about preserving land for wildlife or recreation.”

These days, Johnson says, “He’s gotten hung up on this twin tunnel stuff. And for that, he deserves to be tarred and feathered.”

The tunnels Johnson refers to would divert water from the Sacramento River to thirsty farms and cities down south, ostensibly to reduce pumping from the ecologically hammered Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They’ve become so synonymous with the state’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP, and so many environmentalists hate them, that in activist circles “BDCP,” says Phillips, stands for “Big Dumb Concrete Pipes.”

Phillips acknowledges that Brown is “weak on natural resource issues,” but disputes Johnson’s view that the septuagenarian statesman differs so radically from the 36-year-old idealist who eschewed the governor’s mansion for a downtown apartment because he wanted to walk to work. Like his father, Pat, who ran the state for two terms starting in 1959, “Brown has always been devoted to the idea that technology can solve all our problems,” she says. “The Browns like to ‘get shit done.’ ”

That’s not all bad, Phillips argues; it’s the very quality that “helped us transition so quickly to cleaner (electricity production) in this state.” It’s just that engineering marvels like dams, canals and high-speed rail often conflict with protecting habitat and open space.

Brown could, of course, leave an impressive- legacy on climate alone, if he’d only hold consistently to that goal. On Feb. 7, a coalition of environmental groups will hold a climate march in Oakland, Brown’s hometown, where he served as mayor for eight years, and participants apparently believe Brown is vulnerable to the pressure such a demonstration can bring.

“The standard slogan you see at these rallies,” Phillips says, “is ‘Climate Heroes Don’t Frack.’ I think the governor knows that. I think he understands that extreme extraction techniques to pull up oil will counteract all his other climate goals. I have hope that he’ll make the right decision.”

This story was originally titled "The limits of legacy" in the print edition.

]]>No publisherPoliticsCaliforniaClimate Change2015/02/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleRegulators dampen hopes for tribal solar project http://www.hcn.org/articles/nevada-regulators-dampen-hopes-for-a-second-solar-project-on-tribal-land-1
The Moapa Solar Energy Center would have provided 175 megawatts to Nevada's largest utility.Hardly a better place to generate solar power exists on planet earth than the 71,000 acre Moapa River Reservation, 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada. A wedge in the rainshadows of two small mountain ranges, the Moapa Valley enjoys, on average, 297 sunny days a year. That sun these days is a powerful resource, one the Moapa Band of Paiutes have just begun to exploit. “For us, solar power is an opportunity to combine stewardship of the land with economic development,” former tribal chairman Darren Daboda told me last year. “It fits into the holistic approach that we believe in — to minimize our impact and maximize our resources.”

In March, the Moapa, in collaboration with Tempe, Arizona developer First Solar, broke ground on the first major solar farm ever built on tribal lands, a 250-megawatt plant that, when it’s finished, will power roughly 110,000 homes for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Daboda and his crew have hoped it would be the start of a trend, and they've laid down plans for more solar farms, including one near the site of the 550-megawatt Reid Gardner coal plant, which for 50 years has spewed toxic air and ash over the tiny community’s homes and playgrounds. Last week, however, those plans were quashed, at least temporarily, when the Nevada Public Utilities Commission rejected, for the second time, a proposal by NV Energy — Reid Gardner’s owner and the state’s largest utility — to buy that plant’s power.

The reason, environmentalists who supported the plant say, is that regulators haven’t caught up with recent trends in the solar market, where the price of photovoltaic panels dropped more than 80 percent since 2008. “They still see it at it as a bad deal for ratepayers,” says Barbara Boyle, a senior representative with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, which lobbied hard for the commission’s approval. “It’s a real problem, trying to get (utility commission) staff and consumer advocates up to speed on this, and to acknowledge the price of solar has changed.”

And not only that — during the same period that China's cheap solar panels were driving solar prices crazily downward, Nevada dramatically ramped up its clean-energy ambitions. In the spring of 2013, NV Energy announced a plan to close its coal-fired power plants by 2019; the following June, the Nevada legislature applied that same ethic to the entire state with Senate Bill 123, a law requiring utilities to retire almost all coal plants and replace them with cleaner generation. Reid Gardner's last turbine will spin down within two years.

Reid Gardner's closing notwithstanding, NV Energy doesn’t actually need the full $383 million, 175-megawatt RES Americas’ project to comply with the new law; the utility is a mere 54 megawatts shy of acquiring all its replacement power. But NV Energy spokeswoman Jennifer Schuricht says the Moapa Solar Energy Center had other merits. “It was shovel ready and would have provided hundreds of construction jobs,” she wrote in an email. It would also have produced power, she says, at or below national average for solar generation.

Boyle says it could even have competed well against natural gas. “Natural gas has a fuel price,” she says, “and there’s no guarantee it’s going to stay low.”

The Moapa project might also, in a less quantifiable way, repair the relationship between the utility and the people who suffered so long downwind from its coal plant. But that’s rarely something utility commissions anywhere consider.

Instead, the commissioners turned down the Moapa project for one simple reason, says their spokesman, Peter Kostes: They wanted NV Energy to submit their plans to a competitive bidding process, as Nevada law requires. While certain projects can skirt around that process, in this case, the commissioners didn’t deem it in the public interest to do so. And without the data about relative job creation and economic benefits the bidding process would reveal, the commissioners couldn't justify their support.

Barbara Boyle thinks that insistence on bids was too “strict,” and worries that NV Energy will now back out now altogether — a rumor Schuricht would neither confirm nor deny. And she holds to her position: “Some at the (Nevada) Public Utilities Commission,” she says, “continue to be resistant to renewable energy.”

Kostes insists, however, that regulators would have treated any other project the same way. “The commissioners are adamant that they’re not precluding another solar project,” he says. “They just want more information.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is acontributing editor of High Country News. She tweets @judlew.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustrySolar EnergyRenewable EnergyNevadaTribesCalifornia2014/12/23 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleWill California's Proposition 1 give rise to more dams?http://www.hcn.org/articles/will-californias-proposition-1-give-rise-to-more-dams-1
While some environmental groups support the water bond on Tuesday's ballot, some call it "mystery meat."Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion water bond on the California ballot next Tuesday, could provide millions of dollars for projects everyone likes. It sets aside funds to strip pollutants from valuable urban aquifers; it will bring in money to repair aging pipes that leach pollutants into drinking water. And the Salton Sea and the Los Angeles River could get part of the $500 million the measure authorizes for restoring damaged ecosystems. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California shows 58 percent of the state's voters will go for it.

So what about it makes many environmental groups so mad? The Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and San Francisco Baykeeper have all taken an explicit stand against Proposition 1, as has virtually every fisherman’s advocacy group in the state. The Sierra Club, though it officially opposed the legislative bill that produced the ballot measure, remains neutral in theory, but the group's position statement announcing neutrality also uses the word hate.

Chelsea Tu, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, says the problem comes down to this: While the bond measure does indeed give a nod to higher environmental concerns, “those beneficial provisions are far outweighed by the $2.7 billion in the bill set aside for surface and groundwater storage provisions.” In other words, the "public benefits" it funds could mean new dams: One would flood 14,000 acres in Colusa County north of Sacramento for the proposed Sites Reservoir; another would augment current San Joaquin River water storage at Temperance Flat. Prop. 1 funds could also go toward adding 18.5 feet to Shasta Dam — a $1.1 billion project touted as a “bargain” by Westlands Water District General Manager Tom Birmingham, but opposed by the Winnemem Wintu tribe, which was flooded out of sacred lands once when the dam was first built in 1945.

Proposition 1 never explicitly states that any of the $2.7 billion will fund dam projects, however, and not every environmental group worries quite so much. “The era of big dams is over,” pronounced Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, on the organization’s blog. “The water bond does not earmark funding for Temperance Flat or any other surface storage project.” Dams cost too much money to make sense anymore; even with taxpayer subsidies they “can’t compete economically with these regional and local water supply projects.”

Tu thinks that’s not only “optimistic,” but at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown’s oft-stated agenda. “Every time the Governor talks about the water crisis, he talks about building out water infrastructure projects that go back to the 1950s,” she says. “Those are projects that both state and federal legislatures have been pushing for many, many years.” They’re also projects that the state’s agricultural interests, which consume more than three-quarters of the state’s water, have lobbied hard for, along with a multibillion-dollar tunnel project that would suck water from the Sacramento River before it ever gets to the ailing California Delta. (Prop. 1 was written to be “tunnel neutral.”)

Adam Scow, California campaign director for Food and Water Watch, calls Prop. 1"a bunch of mystery meat," ominously geared toward finding more ways to deliver water to industrial agriculture. Even more alarming, he says, is that according to the provisions of the bill, the nine members of the California Water Commission have been tasked with allocating the meat. Those nine members have been appointed by "Big Agriculture's closest ally," Scow says. "A man named Jerry Brown."

Scow thinks Proposition 1’s other benefits recede in light of that fact. Aquifer cleanup, water for fish, habitat restoration and drinking water for disadvantaged communities are all good, he says, and even necessary. They just don’t have to be yoked to what he calls “a bloated bond deal,” written with industrial agriculture in mind.

“We do need to address the inequities in water rights we have in this state,” Scow says. “We just don’t need a bond deal to do it.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is a High Country News contributing editor. She tweets @judlew.

]]>No publisherWaterAgricultureCaliforniaPolitics2014/10/30 21:50:00 GMT-6ArticleRegulators release report on viability of nuclear waste storage at Yuccahttp://www.hcn.org/articles/yucca-mountain-is-still-dead
But it doesn't mean the Nevada site is safe — or even back on the docket.“Reid Blasts Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Approval Of Yucca Nuclear Waste Site,” blared a headline last week at Law360, a news site devoted to the legal profession, referring to Nevada's senior Senator, Harry. “NRC Deems Nuclear Waste Storage at Yucca Mountain Safe,” announced Power, an electrical industry trade magazine. Reps. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and John Shimkus, R-Ill., chair of the Environment and the Economy Subcommittee, issued a joint statement calling some recent news out of the federal agency that regulates nuclear power “game-changing.”

None of the ballyhoo was warranted, however; the proposed repository for spent nuclear-reactor fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 100 miles west of Las Vegas, remains in the same state it was in 2009, when President Obama, hewing to a campaign promise, ordered work at Yucca Mountain to stop. The project, which has cost taxpayers nearly $16 billion so far, has not been approved or declared safe; it has not been revived or resuscitated. It has not even been released from the decades-long purgatory it was born into in 1987, when Congress, rushing to finish up before the Christmas holiday, chose it as the sole potential site for high-level waste disposal, having no better reason than that the state of Nevada had so little political power. (The decision was forever after known as the “Screw Nevada Bill”).

Boring a hole in the tuff: The proposed nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain before the Obama administration stopped work on it in 2009. Photo courtesy of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

What did happen is that, on October 16, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission published Volume 3 of a five-volume evaluation of the facility’s construction license application. It was not news, really, so much as policy in perpetual motion, like residual brain activity in a body whose heart has stopped. The Obama administration may have had the authority to silence the drills and end the spelunking tours of Yucca Mountain, but the courts in 2010 still denied the Energy Department's request to withdraw the license application, on the grounds that Congress stipulated the terms of the licensing process in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and only Congress can change that law.

Which means that the 17-volume, 8,600-page construction authorization license application that the Bush administration's Energy Department, managed to submit to the NRC — just under the wire in June 2008 — gets a full treatment by the Obama administration's regulators. Even if they have to proceed with a skeleton crew, funded at only a 10th of the agency’s ask, and untethered from any concrete, real-world goal. Volume 1 of the safety evaluation report came out in 2010, offering a general description of the project as laid out in the licensing application. The rest will come out next year.

“Publication of Volume 3,” reads the NRC’s statement, “does not signal whether the NRC might authorize construction of the repository.” High-level waste from commercial reactors will still remain in cooling pools and dry casks at the plants that produce it, a temporary fix that regulators have deemed adequate for now. What the 781-page document does, instead, is review the construction license application for a Yucca Mountain repository and determine whether the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management did a fair job evaluating its characteristics.

Did the authors of the license application, for instance, adequately consider the question “what can happen?” to the waste, taking into account geology, earthquakes and the potential corrosion of metal barriers that might allow radiation to escape? Did they consider the consequences if, 200,000 years from now, unsuspecting humanoids enter the facility and open a waste package? Did they account for “igneous disruption,” given that Yucca Mountain “lies in a region that has experienced sporadic volcanic activity in the last few million years?”

Yes, they did all of that, Volume 3 concludes. But its words could comfort no one in the thought that nuclear waste belongs in Yucca Mountain. Instead, it confirms what even many nuclear boosters admit: Yucca Mountain’s porous volcanic rock would need the significant reinforcement of engineered barriers to contain waste.

“Yucca Mountain is an oxidizing environment,” current NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane, told me back in 2009, while she was still in the academic world to which she will soon return. “Spent nuclear fuel is not stable in the presence of water and oxygen.” That has not changed with the current NRC evaluation of the facility’s license application. It never, ever will.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News and is based in Southern California. Follow @judlew

President Obama among the mountains and smog. Photo courtesy of The City Project.

During my first winter in Los Angeles, the wet, wet year of 1991-1992, I set out on my daily commute east on Interstate 10 and beheld a vision I'd never expected: High, sparkling, snow-capped peaks towering over the city skyline. It’s not that I didn’t know these mountains, the San Gabriel Range, were there; I had read my John McPhee, knew his 1988 New Yorker essay, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” almost by heart. I just never expected to see those mountains framing the city in dawn-colored snow. The sight made me gasp, and I was seized with a compulsion to get up into them.

This past Friday, President Obama, using his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act, came to the San Gabriel foothills to declare 346,000 acres within the San Gabriel Mountains a national monument. The announcement is not without controversy: Officials in some jurisdictions, such as San Bernardino County, demanded their segment of the mountain range excluded; residents of some mountain communities feared the monument would restrict their access to roads and resorts. They showed up at the president’s signing in San Dimas, claiming he’d overstepped his authority.

Most of metropolitan Los Angeles, however, sides with the monument. A recent poll showed 80 percent of residents backing the plan; among Latinos, approval was eight points higher. For all the lack of diversity in U.S. National Parks, the San Gabriels have long been the place where Latino families from park-poor foothill communities bring their children to camp, hike and toboggan in the winter snow. It’s also where Southern California goes to ski and snowboard: Mount Baldy, which rises above 10,000 feet just 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, features an impressive halfpipe.

And while the monument has been carefully drawn to skirt ski resorts and residential developments, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, campgrounds and wildlands will qualify for federal funding for improvements, as will the San Gabriel River, which drains out of a watershed that provides more than a third of the region’s fresh water.

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since I first saw my new city half-ringed by the glittering San Gabriel range. I have walked to the top of most of its peaks: Strawberry, Telegraph and Mount Baden-Powell; Mount Wilson with its famous observatory and forest of antennae; Mount Lukens (the highest point in Los Angeles) and Throop on the Pacific Crest Trail. I have perched myself on rocky slopes to count bighorn sheep for the Forest Service; I have waited out blizzards in a collapsing tent and woken to an enchanted world of virgin snow. All within an hour of a city hardly anyone thinks of as teeming with wild nature.

And I know now why no one told me before about the snowy view from the freeway: The winter after I arrived, Southern California emerged from an epic five-year dry spell that had depleted the state’s reservoirs and turned the Central Valley to dust. No rain in the lowlands means no snow in the mountains, and during those years the San Gabriel River had nearly run dry. It was a drought that was soon forgotten when, by 1993, the reservoirs were full again and fire departments spent several winter storms rescuing people who’d been swept away in flood-control channels. Southern Californians have a way of denying the preeminence of hydrological cycles, geology, wildlife and weather that defines our lives whether we respect them or not. Perhaps with a monument in our backyards, we’ll pay better attention.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor to High Country News. She is based in Southern California and tweets @judlew. Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Mount Lukens is the highest point in Los Angeles County, when in fact it is only the highest within the city of Los Angeles.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsRecreationCaliforniaWildernessPolitics2014/10/13 09:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHas the Obama administration hobbled the Endangered Species Act?http://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/has-the-obama-administration-hobbled-the-endangered-species-act
A new policy may set the law back half a century. On June 27, the two federal agencies that list endangered species — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Services — published a 140-page policy document about the five-word phrase “significant portion of its range.” It purports to be the final word in a long battle over that phrase, a fight that has kept lawyers on both sides gainfully employed while giving conservationists migraines. It has the potential to upend U.S. policy on endangered and threatened species, leaving dozens of species unprotected by law in broad swaths of their historic ranges.

And hardly anyone noticed that it happened.

Hardly anyone, that is, outside of conservation biologists, wildlife managers and lawyers. Conservationists have long insisted that the phrase is clear on its face: A species that’s in jeopardy in a significant portion of its range — the flat-tailed horned lizard, for instance, in the Sonoran Desert — warrants protection simply on that basis. The inhabitants of that significant portion don’t have to be crucial to the global survival of the species; it’s enough that they’re disappearing from a place where they typically thrived.

Developers and industry representatives, on the other hand, argue the opposite: If you wipe out all the flat-tailed horned lizards in Arizona, but that same lizard nevertheless persists quite heartily in, say, Mexico, then the species should not be listed.

To conservationists’ dismay, the Obama administration has now opted for the latter argument. That’s no surprise: “We’ve been operating (with that interpretation) on a case-by-case basis for more than a decade,” says U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman Gavin Shire. “Now we have formalized our criteria in an official definition.”

And while the announcement flew under the general public’s radar, to conservationists it signals a major shift from the law’s manifest intent.

“It’s fundamentally at odds with what the Endangered Species Act was written for,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, in Portland, Oregon. “The law wasn’t designed to make sure some specimen of a species in some postage-stamp area was preserved. It was designed to retain species in ecosystems that depend on them.”

Flat-tailed horned lizard.

Johnida Dockens, AGFD

The agency’s interpretation appears to be the same one struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001, in a battle over the aforementioned flat-tailed horned lizard. The lizard had been squeezed out of most of its range in the Sonoran Desert of California and Arizona; it hung on in a few isolated patches and refuges. But U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to list it as endangered, so the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife sued. The court didn’t totally side with Defenders, which had argued that the projected amount of lost habitat (over 80 percent) compelled the lizard’s listing. But neither did it buy then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s argument that “a species is in danger of extinction in ‘a significant portion of its range’ only if it is in danger of extinction everywhere.” For that to be true, the court said, “significant portion” and “all” would have to mean the same thing. And, of course, they don’t.

Shire explains (and the policy document verifies) a key difference between Norton’s argument and the current policy. Under Norton, a species that meets the listing criteria — meaning that its loss in a portion of its range puts the entire global population at risk — nonetheless merits protection only where it’s already in trouble. Under the current policy, such a species will be defended wherever it roams or grows. But Michael Paul Nelson, a professor and environmental ethicist at Oregon State University, says that’s missing the point: Congress included “significant portion of its range” in the 1973 act, he says, so that wildlife managers could get ahead of crises and act before an entire species teetered on the brink of extinction. Two earlier laws, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 and the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969, “were deemed inadequate,” he says, “in part because they only called for intervention when species were at risk of global extinction.” At that point, it was often too late.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Dan Ashe has pitched the policy clarification as a resource-saving move. “We’re looking at our very limited budgets and limited abilities and asking, ‘Where can that money be put to best use?’ ” Shire explains, adding that species — at least vertebrates — at risk in a limited area can also be listed under the “distinct population segment” amendment to the act in 1978.

But that’s an imperfect category, too: Until recently, the Canada lynx in the U.S. was considered “distinct” and protected in just 14 states; if a cat crossed the wrong state boundary, it lost its threatened status. (As of Oct. 14, the animal will be protected “where found.”) The northern Sonoran Desert population of the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, a tiny raptor that inhabits Southwestern desert scrub and mesquite woodlands, was listed as an endangered distinct population segment in 1997 — until developers sued and won on the grounds that the bird was doing fine in Mexico.

Noah Greenwald agrees that the pygmy-owl in the northern Sonoran Desert did not qualify as “distinct” from its brethren across the border. But the Center for Biological Diversity insisted that the bird was nonetheless imperiled in a “significant portion of its range.” Some agency scientists agreed, but in the end Fish and Wildlife said no. “They said even if (the pygmy-owl) were lost in the Sonoran Desert, the species as a whole would be OK,” Greenwald says, an interpretation based more on politics than science.

“The policy itself is a political decision to try and limit the scope of the ESA,” Greenwald says. “The pygmy-owl exemplifies that.” The organization will likely sue on its behalf.

Nelson, meanwhile, wants the public to realize how far one of the country’s landmark environmental laws has strayed from its 1973 intent. The Obama administration, Nelson says, has narrowed “significant” to mean “only preventing the complete extinction of a species, no more.” He adds, “I would guess that the citizens of the United States might have a very different answer.”

]]>No publisherWildlifePoliticsEndangered Species2014/10/13 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleSolar in the desert finally gets some scrutinyhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/solar-in-the-desert-finally-gets-some-scrutiny
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to California's Mojave Desert this September to announce a multi-agency effort to boost renewable energy development in the desert. But first, she had to go on a hike.

“We went out into the Big Morongo Preserve,” she told reporters. “Fifteen, 20 minutes from here, there are wetlands. Wetlands, and 254 different bird species. Who knew?”

I remember being amazed, too, on a 2008 visit to that same preserve with a couple of California conservationists. I thought I knew the dry desert, its banded sunsets and varieties of lizards. But Morongo was a wonderland of seeps and birds, where a couple of times we stopped to behold a desert tortoise munching on purple flowers.

It was also a wonderland through which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had hoped to string a transmission corridor. The city planned to call it the Green Path North, as it would haul geothermal energy from the Salton Sea to the transmission hubs that serve Los Angeles.

That transmission line never happened. As with so many renewable energy projects slated for the Mojave and Colorado deserts of California, Green Path North mostly fell victim to market forces — but not before it sullied the utility’s reputation locally. The proposal had the effect of uniting off-roaders, rock climbers and conservationists in protest against the careless industrialization of the desert for energy projects – even clean-energy projects.

The new Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a collaboration among federal, state and local governments, the solar industry, Native American tribal leaders and environmentalists, is an attempt to get ahead of such careless proposals. An analysis of 22.5 million acres of desert land, both public and private, it sets aside habitat for desert species like the tortoise and bighorn sheep. It should guide developers toward land rich with transmission, but absent cultural and natural resources.

Jewell called it a “road map” that can be used for more renewable energy development around the country. As she stood against a background of windmills just outside of Palm Springs, California, describing how the Obama administration means to “double down” on public-lands renewable energy development, the 8,000-page document went online.

So far, environmental groups have mostly praised the effort, as have Native American leaders and national park advocates. Kim Delfino, the California program director at Defenders of Wildlife, says she hopes it means that “we can focus on the projects we all can support.” The Sierra Club calls the plan “a promising step” toward protecting “areas with environmental, cultural, or scenic value that should be preserved for future generations.”

Energy developers, too, should be happy, as the plan promises to end the uncertainty that has wasted so much of their time and money. Two weeks before the plan’s release, for example, the California Energy Commission had belatedly approved the Palen Solar Power Plant, a collaboration between California-based BrightSource Energy and Spanish developer Abengoa. The commission had rejected the project last December, partially on the grounds that its peculiar technology — fields of mirrors that concentrate sunlight on a 750-foot high tower — would create hazards for birds in the Colorado Desert. A similar BrightSource solar plant on California’s border with Nevada seems to be creating an ecological “megatrap” that kills birds.

But in mid-September, the commission changed course: The project could go ahead, but at only half of its proposed size. Then, on Sept. 26, the developers suddenly withdrew their application. The delay had cost them a federal tax credit, and, quite possibly, their power purchase agreement with a major California utility.

The Palm Springs newspaper, TheDesert Sun, called the cancellation “shocking,” accurately summing up the general reaction to the announcement. But the real shock should not have been that Palen was canceled, but that the project was ever considered an appropriate idea for a place where it could do so much damage.

Will the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which clears the way for 20,000 more megawatts of solar and wind on desert lands by 2040, prevent more ill-planned projects that stutter and fail? Everyone I talked to who’d come to hear Secretary Jewell speak said they were optimistic.

But a conservation plan is only as good as the people who make it happen on the ground. It’s worth remembering the lesson of the Green Path North: No energy project can be green without the support of the people who will have to live alongside it. And environmental ideals mean little if they aren’t backed up by genuine care for the local landscape.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She is a contributing editor for the magazine, and is based in California.

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2014/10/09 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA plan for California desert conservation comes onlinehttp://www.hcn.org/articles/a-long-awaited-plan-for-california-desert-conservation-and-renewable-energy-planning-2
Will it stop more solar and wind projects from being built in the wrong places?Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to California's Mojave Desert on Tuesday to announce the release of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a five-year, multi-agency effort to make the desert safe for renewable energy development. But first, she had to go on a hike. “We went out into the Big Morongo Preserve,” she told reporters later. “Fifteen, 20 minutes from here, there are wetlands. Wetlands. And 254 different bird species. Who knew?”

I remember being surprised, too, in 2008, on a visit to that same preserve with Joan Taylor of the Sierra Club and Ruth Rieman of the California Desert Coalition for a story in this magazine. I thought I knew the desert, its decomposed granite playgrounds and treacherous cholla, its banded skies and varieties of lizards. But Morongo was a wonderland of flowers and seeps and birds, where a couple of times we had to stop and behold a tortoise munching on magenta flowers. It was also a wonderland through which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had planned to string a transmission corridor, the Green Path North, to bring geothermal energy from the Salton Sea to the transmission hubs that serve Los Angeles.

That transmission line never happened. As with so many renewable energy projects slated for the Mojave and Colorado deserts of California, Green Path North fell victim to market forces. Many more, however, will get built. Jewell, standing against

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announces the release of a new conservation plan for renewable energy in California.

a background of windmills just outside of Palm Springs, California, said the Obama administration means to “double down” on its renewable energy goals, which so far have led to 13 utility-scale renewable energy projects on public lands in the West.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, an analysis of 22.5 million acres of desert land, public and private, is an attempt, at least, to make sure those projects don’t ruin places like the Morongo Preserve. A collaboration among federal, state and local governments, industry, environmentalists and local residents, the conservation plan has loomed among all those groups as a potential end to energy and conservation conflicts. It will set aside land for conservation and protect desert species like the tortoise and fringe-toed lizard. It will guide developers toward land rich with transmission but poor in cultural and natural resources and help them identify which places their projects could trample.

It will be, Jewell said, a “road map” that can be used for other renewable energy development plans around the country. As Jewell spoke, the 8,000-page document went online for the first time.

So far, environmental groups have mostly praised the effort. Kim Delfino, the California program director at Defenders of Wildlife, told me she at least believes that certain fought-over areas, such as the Silurian Valley near Death Valley, will be cordoned off for conservation, “so we can focus on the projects we all can support.” The Sierra Club calls the plan “a promising step,” toward protecting “areas with environmental, cultural, or scenic value that should be preserved for future generations.”

It also clears the way for 20,000 more megawatts of renewable energy to be built on desert lands by 2040. That’s 40 solar plants the size of Bright Source Energy’s Ivanpah Solar Generating Station on the California Nevada border, which has been frying birds at a disheartening rate. That many projects will require at least another 200,000 acres of land. The conservation plan’s “preferred alternative” designates more than 2 million acres on which to do it.

Two weeks before the plan came out, the California Energy Commission green-lighted a solar plant about an hour west of the wind turbines where Jewell spoke. The Palen Solar Power Plant, in the Colorado Desert, just outside Joshua Tree National Park, near the Arizona border, was conceived several years ago by the now-defunct German company Solar Millennium as a concentrating solar thermal plant where long troughs of ground mirrors would have focused the sun’s energy to produce electricity. To many, it wasn’t such a big deal.

“We didn’t even comment on it,” says Mark Butler, a former Joshua Tree National Park superintendent. “It really wasn’t an issue for the Park Service.”

Then Solar Millennium went bankrupt, and sold off its assets and projects to other developers. Palen made its way to Bright Source, which specializes in solar plants where large fields of mirrors focus sunlight on a tower that rises up to 750 feet high. The state energy commission last winter rejected the plan. There was concern about how the mirrors’ intense heat, which creates a phenomenon called solar flux, would affect birds flying so near to the Colorado River along the Pacific Flyway. At Ivanpah, the mirrors and three 500-foot towers seem to be creating an ecological “megatrap,” where heat and light attract insects, which attract birds, which lure even more wildlife into danger.

Palen promises to be a bigger concern, even if the Energy Commission, in a recent turn around on the project, cuts it in half. Its one tower will rise 750 feet, visible from Joshua Tree National Park. Would have the Desert Renewable Conservation Plan have stopped Palen, which is located in a Bureau of Land Management-approved Solar Energy Zone? If the plan had been done before land was chosen for projects like Palen and Ivanpah, would they be where they are?

Everyone who came to see Jewell speak expressed optimism, and everyone who spoke after her — including U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, and Congressman Raul Ruiz — jubilant and eloquent in his home district, the “magic and medicine” of the desert — did, too. In the meantime, however, many conservationists worry a disaster is unfolding at Palen that no newly hatched conservation plan can stop.

“If we want to do things ‘smart from the start,’” Barbara Boyle of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign told me, “we’ll stop and analyze what’s going on at Ivanpah. There’s an experiment going on out there, and we’re not done collecting data.” And no conservation plan, no matter how comprehensive and thoughtful, can substitute for that.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryRenewable EnergyWildlifeTribesDepartment of InteriorDesertsU.S. Department of Energy2014/09/24 10:10:00 GMT-6ArticleMichelle Huneven writes about place, addiction and lovehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.16/michelle-huneven-writes-about-place-addiction-and-love
This California author examines lost years and life in the mountains.Something about Michelle Huneven’s novel, Off Course, makes people want to talk about themselves. Women, especially. I sit down at her wide, rough-hewn kitchen table, vowing not to be one of them. Her 14-year-old terrier mix, Piper, cuddles unabashedly at my feet; a black cat nuzzles my elbow. My resolve topples. While Huneven pours lemon-verbena ice tea into two large juice-jar glasses — “Is it sweet enough?” she asks — I let it slip that I, like Cressida, the novel’s protagonist, lost years of early adulthood to a love affair destined to fail. “Years I wish I could rewrite,” I confess, then catch myself. Stop. Talking.

Huneven narrows her eyes behind her fashionable glasses and pushes a fine dark-blond wisp of hair off her forehead. She listens more than tolerantly. “It’s good,” she says, the way her novel draws out personal stories. “It’s really good.” In fact, she says, she wrote it for young women who might be stuck in that very place — transitioning awkwardly from years of schooling into career and adulthood, casting about in search of their life’s work, dangerously vulnerable to distraction. Especially the distraction of romance.

“I wrote it because I felt like if I’d had this book (at that age) — well, I don’t know that anything would have been different,” she confides. “But I wouldn’t have felt so alone.”

Cressida Hartley is in her late 20s when Off Course begins, in 1982. She has holed up at her parents’ A-frame in the Sierra Nevada to finish her dissertation on the economics of art. It is a time of profound transition: The Reagan administration is introducing trickle-down economics, with Interior Secretary James Watt applying budget principles to land management. Cress sees evidence of their political handiwork all around her, in the “raw stumps and debris piles” accumulating at the edge of the forest, in the local men “grateful and defiantly happy for work,” even if it means decimating their beloved childhood woods.

But she is more concerned with love: The longing for it, the tantalizing promise of it, the wild cycles of vertiginous joy and wretched despair that accompany every mercurial affair. “She gets addicted,” Huneven says. “And that addiction completely structures her life.”

Place matters intensely to Huneven. Her other three novels document a California that is palpably part of the inland West: The foothill communities abutting the citrus groves, the raggedy mountains, the smoggy inland neighborhoods that seekers, carpenters and less-affluent artists transform. Huneven lives in such a place herself — West Altadena, where she grew up — in an airy, radically fixed-up ranch house with her husband, environmental lawyer Jim Potter. Fuerte avocado tree #19, “the tree from which 99 percent of all Fuerte avocados have been cultivated,” once grew on their half-acre property. It’s the kind of detail only someone like Huneven, with her deep feel for California history and the natural world that informs it, would even know, let alone consider spectacular.

The mountains that rise above those California cities figure heavily in Off Course, mountains full of towns like the fictional Sawyer, “funny little enclaves that sit independently outside of real life,” Huneven says, “where oddballs and soreheads go to carve out little lives for themselves.” Bears come to the door in Sawyer, leaving their nose slime on the glass. Woodpeckers rattle the forest; Cress watches in amazement as a deer eats a fish.

“It’s like a picture postcard all the time,” says Huneven. “The autumn is like heaven. When it snows, it would still rise into the 60s and 70s.” It’s the perfect setting for a young woman to procrastinate before capitulating to adulthood, with all its responsibilities and ethical challenges. “Cress doesn’t have the tools to enter fully into life yet,” Huneven says. “She’s still working out how to get her father’s attention.

“We’re patterning beasts,” she adds. “We tend to act things out. Freud says that childhood is always a catastrophe. How do you deal with that catastrophe?”

In 1997, when Huneven published her first novel, Round Rock, she was freelancing as a restaurant critic around Los Angeles, including at the LA Weekly, where I worked as an editor. I saw her slender, congenial face around the office from time to time — I always think of her as smiling — and looked forward to her effervescent, vulnerable columns (“I love bread,” she once wrote in a paean to the staff of life. “I’m drawn to it the way a love-starved child is drawn to anyone remotely kind.”)

“I liked her food writing for the same reason I love her fiction writing,” says her editor back then, Sue Horton, who now edits the opinion page at the Los Angeles Times. “She always got that food had to be put in context — where you’re eating it and with whom and how it’s served. And she likes nuance, which means she was always looking for the odd but important small things that make food delicious or not quite.”

Huneven had already won a prestigious James Beard award for food writing in 1995; still, none of us who knew her peripherally suspected she had great fiction in her. Then one day a fellow staffer came in, waving Round Rock in the air — “Michelle’s written a novel, and it’s really good!” he crowed. A story as much about the California foothill landscape as it was about its wayward alcoholics and the recovering one who counsels them, Round Rock described people so vivid that we worried and grieved about them as if they worked in the building with us.

It wasn’t easy to create that world. “It took me 20 years to write Round Rock,” Huneven says now. She’d submitted it as a short story when she applied to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, back in the late ’70s, where one of her teachers persuaded her it was a novel. “I kind of agreed with him,” she says. “So I kept starting it. But I’d get 100 pages in and be all snarled up. So I’d start it again and then stop.”

After she graduated from Iowa with an MFA, she tried on and off for more than a decade. Then she gave up. “It was the early ’90s by then, and I thought, you know, this is heartbreaking. I’ve been trying to be a writer for so many years. I’ve been out of the workshop for 12, 13 years now, I’ve sold one story. It’s just not happening for me.” So she enrolled at seminary to study to be a Unitarian Universalist Minister. “Then I was sitting in class one day, in seminary, and all of sudden it occurred to me that I’d been starting the novel in the wrong place.”

After the revelation, she rewrote the book. “Now, when you open Round Rock, the place where I started, lo those many years, is now exactly in the middle of the book. Literally to the page.”

Round Rock earned a place on The New York Times notable book list for 1997 and a Los Angeles Times book award nomination. It also broke down whatever barrier kept Huneven from producing. Jamesland, a novel that captures Southern California’s culture of spiritual questing, came out just six years later; her third novel, Blame, about the aftermath of a drunk-driving tragedy, was a National Book Award finalist in 2009.

Off Course is the first of her books to draw heavily from her own life. “I had to make it all much more dramatic and intense,” she says. “But I did write about my love life, about this period of my life that I really thought of as my lost years, when I was living up in the mountains.” She began writing it in 2008 — another time, like the early Reagan era, of economic upheaval.

“It really mirrored the time when I got out of graduate school, when you’re ready and up and willing to join the marketplace and there’s no place for you. You’re stuck in this sort of nether adolescence, where you’re living at home or someplace rent-free to get your feet on the ground and get going, and really one wrong step can throw you,” well ... off course.

So did writing get easier, or did Huneven just figure out how to work? “I think that you get smarter, and I have a lot more help,” she says. “I got out of Iowa, and I had this thing where no one could tell me what to do. My mother was like, ‘Why don’t you join a writing group?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been in a writer’s group, it’s called the Iowa Writers’ Workshop! I do not need a writing group.’ ”

She found one anyway, albeit a very small one. These days, she swaps pages with novelist Mona Simpson (Anywhere But Here) and a few other writers and friends. She is writing another “church novel,” she says, “in the sense that Jamesland is a church novel,” but also has ambitions to do for Altadena what Anthony Trollope did for his imaginary Barsetshire: “A long series of books,” she says, “that take place around here. I mean, why not?”

Some readers might find the books too narrow, but Huneven’s content with sometimes just thrilling a happy few. Off Course, she realizes, “is really a book that cuts down the line. Half the people who read it say that I took Cress too far down; the other half say that what they liked about the book is that I took her so far down.

“I wrote it for those people who understand it,” she says. “For those of us who never saw ourselves in literature.” And now do.

“I love my local California history. The man that used to own the property I live on was a botanist who turned into a eugenicist. He created the field of marriage counseling.”

How to evolve as a writer “Every time I write a book, I take on a technical challenge. In Blame, I didn’t use quotation marks. For Off Course, I wanted to use autobiographical material. In my next book, I’ll create a character that has no backstory.”

On why she set Off Course in the 1980s

“I thought it would be a good way to write about today. I blame Reagan for so much of the economic crap that’s going on — the stupid Milton Friedman crap. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”

]]>No publisher2014/09/15 05:05:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbDid Obama's Interior hobble the Endangered Species Act?http://www.hcn.org/articles/has-obamas-interior-hobbled-the-endangered-species-act
A new policy sets the law back a half-century, conservationists say.The cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl lives in the desert scrub and mesquite woodlands of central and southern Arizona, Texas and Mexico. It is a small bird with swaths of cream-colored feathers, measuring about seven inches long and weighing a little more than two ounces. It eats insects, rodents and lizards, some of them as big as the owls themselves. It nests in the holes woodpeckers leave in saguaro and other cacti and trees.

And it has now become an emblem in a fight over the meaning of a five-word phrase that has dogged the 1973 Endangered Species Act the way “waters of the United States” has muddied the Clean Water Act. If a species, like the pygmy-owl, is at risk of being lost in “a significant portion of its range,” does it merit protection even if the same species is holding on elsewhere? Or do the inhabitants of that “significant portion” need to be crucial to the entire species’ survival?

Those are the questions the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fisheries’ Service, sought to address on June 27, when they announced a new policy to provide “consistency in the application of that phrase” as it applies to endangered or threatened species. Under the new policy, a species on the decline in "a significant portion of its range" can be listed as threatened or endangered only if that portion is crucial to the survival of the species' entire global population.

In other words, if the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl will persist even after the species disappears from, for instance, the northern Sonoran Desert, the bird doesn't warrant protection.

It is not the clarification conservationists wanted. If the interpretation sticks, some say, the 1973 law will have fundamentally changed — reverted, in fact, to the 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act that the 1973 law was written to improve.

“The 1966 law was deemed inadequate in part because scientists pointed out that actions taken only to prevent the complete extinction of a species were likely not to (work),” says Michael Paul Nelson, a professor and environmental ethicist at Oregon State University. “It defined 'endangered species' merely as 'species at risk of extinction.'”

The phrase “significant portion of its range” allowed wildlife agencies to list a species whose numbers were diminishing in the U.S., even if global populations were stable.

In a recent New York Times editorial, Nelson and Michigan Technological University Ecologist John Vucetich argued that the new policy threatens to reduce the act to “a mechanism that merely preserves representatives of a species, like curating rare pieces in a museum.”

The bald eagle might never have merited protection were the policy in effect back in the 1970s; while hunting and DDT were decimating it, it still thrived in Alaska and Canada. The gray wolf wouldn't have been listed, either. The new interpretation of those five words has already been used in the process of delisting the wolf and to deny protection to the wolverine. And it has already contributed to the delisting of the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl.

The cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl’s disappearance from parts of its northern range toward the end of the 20th century wasn’t a mystery: Development had surged in the northern Sonoran Desert. In 1997, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the bird as endangered, developers were livid.

“The bird's listing is ‘dishonest,’” Alan Lurie, executive director of the Southern Arizona Homebuilders' Association, told Tony Davis, who reported on it for this magazine. "Experts tell me the bird is prolific in Mexico (so) it is not truly endangered."

Lurie was partially right: The pygmy-owl was first listed on the grounds that it was a “distinct population segment” from the pygmy-owls on the Mexican side of the border, which it technically wasn't. Developers sued, and in 2006 the pygmy-owl’s listing was overturned.

And yet the owl was clearly endangered in the northern Sonoran Desert. So the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned again for the bird’s protection, arguing this time that it was “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.”

At first Fish and Wildlife agreed. "They actually drafted a proposed rule to list them, arguing for various reasons that we were right," says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the organization in Portland, Oregon. In that draft, which the Center for Biological Diversity obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, “the Sonoran Desert Ecoregion” was deemed “significant,” and the listing of the pygmy-owl within it was warranted.

Then something changed. “Two years later, they looked at that draft policy and said ‘Nope, you’re not right. Even if (the pygmy-owl) were lost in the Sonoran Desert, the species as a whole would be okay.’” A new draft in 2011 claimed that the Sonoran Desert pygmy-owl’s “contribution to the viability of the species” wasn't important enough to list it. The petition was denied.

It was the exact — and to Greenwald and Nelson, deeply flawed — interpretation Interior had been pushing for since 2000; the exact interpretation that had already been struck down by the Ninth Circuit in a case involving the flat-tailed horned lizard in 2001.

And it was the exact interpretation many conservationists were hoping the Obama administration would overturn, not support, in its clarification. “The policy itself is a political decision to try and limit the scope of the ESA,” Greenwald says. His organization will likely sue again, on behalf of the pygmy-owl.

Michael Paul Nelson says the new policy also misses the point. “Many of us would suggest that the ESA is not only about preserving curiosities and the cabinets necessary for those curiosities, but about preserving the role that native species play within ecosystems,” he wrote in an email from the field, where he’s studying the impact of old-growth versus second-growth forests on fish.

The Obama administration’s new policy states clearly that the Act is “only about preventing the complete extinction of a species, no more,” Nelson says. “I would guess that the citizens of the United States, then and now, might have a very different answer.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor for High Country News. She writes from Southern California and tweets @judlew.

]]>No publisherWildlifeU.S. Fish & WildlifeEndangered Species2014/08/28 10:15:00 GMT-6ArticleThe Latest: EPA cuts pollution at the Navajo Generating Stationhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.14/the-latest-epa-cuts-pollution-at-the-navajo-generating-station
75 percent less haze predicted for nearby parks. BackstoryBad air from coal-fired power plants not only causes health problems for the locals; it also ruins the scenery. In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency began addressing the visual impacts of air pollution from power plants, developing plans to reduce haze around national parks and wilderness areas. ("Clean air regulations protect views by targeting coal plants," HCN, 11/14/11).

FollowupOn July 28, the EPA finalized a plan to cut pollution from the Navajo Generating Station, which is located on the Navajo Nation in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. The plant emits more "visibility-impairing" nitrogen oxide than almost any other in the country, second only to the other plant on the reservation, Four Corners in New Mexico. In 2012, the EPA gave Four Corners a 2018 deadline to reduce haze. The Navajo Generating Station has until 2030, when the EPA foresees 75 percent less haze blighting 11 nearby national parks and wilderness areas.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryArizonaCoalU.S. Environmental Protection AgencyTribes2014/08/18 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleWas the fatal thunderstorm in California a climate phenomenon?http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/death-in-venice-are-freak-thunderstorms-a-climate-phenomenon
The weather of Venice Beach, California, where I live, is for the most part stable, and almost always predictable. No sudden squalls appear out of the southwest to chase skateboarders off their concrete ramps; never do we hear the civil-defense sirens warning of an approaching tornado. Living here, swimming and surfing at the beach a few blocks from my house, I have considered many threats: sharks, staph infections, rogue rip tides. Lightning was never on the list.

I didn't go to the beach on Sunday morning, July 27. Crowds generally clog up the swells on weekends, so I escaped to the mountains in Ventura County. When I left, the weather in Venice was gloomy with a mild drizzle — not an unusual syndrome for the Southern California coast — but by the time I hiked and returned to the car at around 3 pm, it had evidently taken a dramatic turn. When I flipped on the radio for the traffic report, I heard that just a half an hour earlier, a bolt of lightning had struck the water near Venice Pier, and 13 people had been injured. Two were found face down in the water.

Frantically, I called home to make sure my husband was not among the victims. He was not; he’d been inside all day. "It was close," he told me, "and loud." On KNX 1070 News Radio, reporters interviewed volleyball players who felt an electrical current through their bodies, who saw other players' hair stand on end. Later we found out that one young man, 20-year-old Nicholas Fagnano, had been killed when he ventured into the water to wash off sand. A 55-year-old man was in the hospital in critical condition; he’d been out on his board riding waves fueled by storms far out at sea — storms he no doubt assumed would remain there, as they almost always do. I arrived home to the repetitive thwump of circling helicopters and the screams of ambulance sirens. There was not a skateboarder nor cyclist, nor beach-going tourist in sight. The surfers who daily walk our streets with their wetsuits stripped to their waists, boards under their arms, were all hunkered down indoors, or on their way back to their inland homes.

Was the bizarre weather that hit Venice Beach a climate-related phenomenon? It's dangerous to pin any one local weather event on climate change; climate, as we know, is global and measured on trend lines, not in isolated cloudbursts. Still, it’s hard not to suspect that something is up with our local weather on the West Coast, an area seized from north to south in an epic and record-breaking drought.

During the months of December and January, the sky stayed relentlessly blue, thanks to a high-pressure ridge parked for months out over the Pacific Ocean. When a storm finally did break through, a half a year's normal rainfall came all in a weekend at the end of February, accompanied by hail and high winds and weak tornadoes. It wasn't different, necessarily, than the weather the region usually gets — long periods of dry weather broken by ferocious rainstorms that flood intersections and send rivers of mud cascading through bedrooms. It was only more extreme.

But the Venice Beach lightning storm was not just a matter of degree. It was fundamentally weird for this microclimate in any time of year, and absolutely unheard of in the summer (even a trace of rain broke records for July in downtown Los Angeles). You have about as much chance as dying by lightning strike in all of California as you have of being killed by a shark anywhere in the world — one in 7.5 million (in Montana, by contrast, the lightning-strike odds are one in 250,000). Of the seven lightning deaths that occurred in California between 2003 and 2012, according to statistics compiled by the National Lightning Detection Network, none were on the coast.

The remains of a storm at Venice Beach, California. Photograph by flickr user Sean Bonner.

“You don’t have the complex vertical structure and wind shear typically associated with lightning storms," Kevin Trenberth, a climate analyst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said of Venice-area weather. Trenberth stopped short of making a lightning-climate connection, but a reporter at the news site the Daily Climate inched closer: “A changing climate may alter those weather patterns,” she wrote, “making such ‘freak’ occurrences more common.”

Confused, I called Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Climate change is huge,” he says. “The world is warming. Los Angeles is warming. I tell my colleagues: I was talking about it before they were born.” But when you have a “normal” climate that produces one inch of rain in one year and 38 in the next, as coastal California does, “it’s almost impossible to say anything about climate change.”

What happened in Venice that Sunday was not a global warming phenomenon, Patzert insists. “It was a weather event.” Patzert went on: “Lightning strikes the surface of the earth 33 million times a day. In the United States on average over the last couple of decades, about 45 people a year are killed by lightning strikes.” They just don’t happen where I live.

“People generally have become blasé about lightning strikes in coastal California,” Patzert says. “We’re just not sensitized because they’re so unusual.”

In Florida, where lightning strikes every day, they have warning systems. “They see it coming, and they clear the beaches and golf courses, and get the kids off the playground.” Such a system may not be worthwhile in Southern California — “you have to weigh the costs versus the frequency” — but the National Weather Service in Colorado already has one in the works: The Lightning Potential Index, developed by lead forecaster Paul Frisbie. Right now, it only covers western Colorado, but it may be expanded “if it proves valuable,” Frisbie told the Christian Science Monitor.

Patzert does allow that eventually, global warming will begin to influence local weather events in a way we can’t ignore. But at the moment, he says, “I’m getting tired of watching extreme weather and global warming stories,” most of which are really about bad zoning decisions or the lack of storm shelters for Oklahoma school children. “What we should be talking about is population density and zoning and living with risk.”

So when can we talk about global climate and local weather? When do we cross the line into a world where a freak summer storm really can be called a climate phenomenon, and the tragic deaths that come with it are climate-related deaths?

“I’ll let you know,” Patzert assures me. “I’ll give you a call in a few years.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor of High Country News. She tweets @judlew.